Dredd VS Death (20 page)

Someone was behind everything that had happened so far, and Dredd and the rest of the Justice Department didn't have a clue yet who that someone could be.

First things first, decided Dredd angrily. First we deal with Death and the others, then we find out who was responsible for this whole mess.

"Understood, Control. Awaiting h-wagon pick-up. Dredd out."

He was at the outside of the mall, supervising as meat wagons and med-wagons arrived to take away the dead and injured, and pat-wagons delivered more Judges to deal with the situation inside the mall. As he watched, a group of injured cits were brought out of the place. Six of them were stretcher cases, and the walking wounded were splattered with gore and nursed blood-soaked bandages showing where they had been clawed or bitten in zombie attacks. A Med-Judge accompanied them, saw Dredd and came running over to him.

"The wounded are starting to stack up now, Dredd. We've got over two hundred injured cits, all the victims of zombie bites. What little we've got to go on with these things all suggests that they were reanimated by a retrovirus passed on to them by bites from the things that attacked Nixon Pen. What do we do if the retrovirus affects living victims the same way?"

"Quarantine?" asked Dredd.

"That's what I'm thinking," nodded the Med-Judge, grimly. "If I've got a couple of hundred injured cits here who are maybe going to turn into vamps or flesh-hungry zombies in an hour or two, then we need to do something to either cure them or contain them."

"Good point," agreed Dredd, activating his helmet radio again.

"It's an interesting question, Dredd," said Helsing, bending over the zombie specimen on the autopsy slab in front of him. Even with most of its cranium missing, destroyed by one of Helsing's own Lawgiver shots, they weren't taking any chances with the thing. It was secured to the table by metal restraints, and there were armed Judges standing by in the room to make sure that the zombie and the rest of its equally dead friends weren't going to pull any more surprise resurrection stunts. Helsing was glad of the guards' presence, and was fairly sure that if they had arrived a few moments later when he had first raised the alarm then he would probably be lying stretched out on one of his own autopsy slabs along with the rest of the dead meat on display here.

"As far as I can tell," he continued, talking via radio link to Dredd while he neatly sliced into the zombie's body with his trusty las-scalpel, "the virus changes structure when it jumps from the vampires and into the bloodstreams and nervous systems of their victims. It degenerates, becoming less effective, so that when the dead tissue is reanimated, virtually all the higher brain functions are lost, and all that remains are the most basic and animalistic urges such as hunger and aggression."

"But is it contagious?" asked Dredd, a clear note of impatience in his tone.

"To anyone non-fatally bitten by these things? I'm not sure, I'm afraid. I'll have to do tests on blood samples for the bite victims, but it's my hope that the more degenerative form of the virus only affects dead tissue. In fact, it was only when I saw it in its degenerated form that I realised where I had seen it before-"

"You've seen this virus before? Where?" The note of impatience in Dredd's voice had suddenly been replaced by one of alert interest.

"In molecular form, it's strikingly similar to the chemical formula recently patented by the EverPet Corporation."

"Pet Regen? The stuff that brings cits' dead pets back to life?" The disbelief in Dredd's voice was clear.

"Basically, yes," answered Helsing calmly. "It's very possibly an early test-form of the final product."

There was a pause on the radio link before Dredd answered: "Good work, Helsing. Keep me informed if you find anything else. Dredd out."

Helsing bent down over the corpse again, wincing from the pain in his arm. He'd had the wound dressed and had allowed a Med-Judge to administer him some minor pain-killer tabs, but nothing that would interfere with his thought processes or cloud his judgement, and he had absolutely refused the Med-Judges' suggestions that he go into med-may for observation.

One of the zombies had got a little too close for comfort, and had taken a bite out of Helsing's left arm before the Judge had managed to jam his las-scalpel deep into its brainpan. Despite the worrying certainty that he, too, now had the retrovirus coursing through his bloodstream, Helsing tried to look on the bright side, telling himself that having a personal stake in this case would give his work an extra added impetus.

After all, now he was in the same boat as the other injured citizens who had been bitten so far, and if the retrovirus was contagious in this fashion then it really rather was in his interest, just as much as theirs, that he find a cure as soon as possible.

Humming quietly to himself, he applied the las-scalpel to another part of the zombie's exposed innards, calmly continuing on with his work.

Someone had deliberately engineered the virus that had created the vampire and zombie creatures. Someone had organised and funded the Church of Death and had mounted a successful operation to free the Dark Judges from their prison - but now Dredd had a good idea just who that someone might be.

"Control - Dredd. Been a change of plan. I still need that h-wagon, but the rendezvous with Anderson will have to wait. If she needs back-up, recommend Judge Giant for the job. Tell my pilot to pick me up and then plot a course at double-speed for the EverPet Corporation's HQ, and give me everything you've got from Central Records on the company."

After so long shut away in the darkness, disembodied and under constant guard, it was good to be free to kill once more. Their servants had done well - the teleporters were a good copy of the devices the Dark Judges had used on their own world - and now those devices had brought them to this fine place where there were so many sinners to be judged, and no interlopers with their guns to interrupt Death and his brethren in their sacred work.

Fire lashed out with his burning trident. More of the crude dwellings burst into flame. Screaming figures stumbled amidst the inferno, burning from head to foot. The others fled from where they had been cowering, flushed out from hiding by the flames, herded by further blasts from Fire's trident straight into the deadly embrace of the other three Dark Judges.

Death pushed a hand into the chest of one sinner, his fingers twisting amongst the arteries of his heart. With his other hand, he thrust into the back of another fleeing figure, withdrawing it again almost as quickly, leaving Death clutching his gory, dripping prize in triumph. The man kept on running for a few steps more, and then collapsed to the ground, an expression of utter and horrified disbelief fixed on his face. Death threw the still-beating heart into the spreading flames and then moved on to judge more of the sinners.

Mortis looked down at the begging, whimpering figure kneeling before him. There was decay in this one already, he could sense. Disease festered within him, his insides eaten away by the bottles of low-grade meths-brew he had been consuming for years. All it would take to bring it out to full bloom in the sinner's body was the merest touch from the Dark Judge.

Mortis's fingers stroked the man's face, leaving deep, pus-filled boils where they brushed the skin. Almost instantly, the man fell writhing to the ground, maggots boiling out of his rotting flesh as it slewed away wholesale from his bones. Mortis hissed in pleasure, and strode on to bestow his gifts to the next sinner in turn. Where he walked across the uneven, broken ground, where his feet made contact with the polluted soil there, maggots and other carrion insects sprang out of the earth in the wake of his passing.

Fear flowed out of the shadows of a heap of crumbling war ruins, seemingly appearing from nowhere to the rabble of sinners who had been fleeing the wall of flame behind them. The barred gate of his helmet visor gaped open, and the first few sinners in line caught a glimpse of what lay behind that visor, and fell lifeless to the ground, their hearts frozen solid like blocks of ice, fireworks exploding amongst the darkness of their dimming vision as their brains were wracked by a series of instantly fatal embolisms.

The others turned and fled, seeking escape amongst the ruins. Fear spread his cloak wide, revealing the living darkness that lay beneath the garment. Shadow-shapes, moving too swiftly to be properly seen, flew out of that darkness and flitted after the escaping sinners. As each shadow-shape found its target a sinner fell to the ground screaming and writhing, their minds filled with images of the things they had previously glimpsed only on the furthest fringes of their worst nightmares. Fear stalked forward to find his prey and finish them off, his mystic senses guided by the screams in the darkness and by the delicious taste of the victims' terror.

Death stood upon a small mound of the corpses of his victims and exalted in being free once more. The place they had found - the place destiny and their teleporters had brought them to - was one of those places where the lost and dispossessed drank to blot out the worst details of those existences. Of all the inhabitants of this city, these were amongst the most wretched and miserable, with little or nothing left to live for, but still they had tried to run when the Dark Judges had appeared amongst them. As all foolish mortals did, they had tried to survive rather than surrender to the inevitable.

What was it about these sinners, Death wondered, that they wanted to compound their crimes by hanging onto the sin of life for as long as they could? With more co-operation, with more understanding of what it was he and his brethren were trying to achieve, their great work would be done all the sooner, and then first this city and then the rest of this world would know peace at last.

The giant towers of the city loomed up around this area of waste ground where the lost ones had made their home on the ruins of one of the city's past wars. So many wars these sinners fought amongst themselves, and still they had not succeeded in wiping themselves out. So disappointing. That was why their great work was so necessary, Death knew. If the sinners did not have the courage to end their own existences, then it was the task of the Dark Judges to do it for them.

The sound of h-wagon engines interrupted Death's contemplation. He saw the running lights and search-beams of the aerial vehicles coming closer across the darkness of the ruins, and realised that time was short.

He called his brothers to him. Some of the sinners still lived, fleeing in terror into the darkness and towards the city lights beyond, but it did not matter. Their escape was only temporary and they, like the rest of this doomed city, would be judged soon enough.

"They have found us," said Fire. "We must leave this place and continue our work elsewhere."

"There are only four of us, and many of them. They will be determined to stop us, just as they have stopped us before," said the dead, cold voice of Mortis.

"We are still weak from our long captivity," noted Fear, his whispering voice like a cold shiver running down the spine. "Perhaps we should return to Deadworld to gather our strength. We have more power there than we have here."

"Or perhaps Deadworld should come to us."

It was Death who spoke. The other three Dark Judges looked at their leader. With all their minds psychically linked, it took only a moment for them to realise the intent of his words. His plan was instantly met with a low chorus of approving hisses.

"I will gather the sacrifices and go to the Under-Place to prepare the way," whispered Fear. This too met with an approving chorus of hisses.

It was Death that spoke next. "They seek four of us together. If we are apart, they will be confused. Their forces will be spread thinly as they attempt to find us. The carnage we other three bring will distract them. They will not realise what it is we plan to do until it is too late to stop us."

Death looked at the other three Dark Judges. "Judge well, brothers. When next we meet, in the Under-Place, this city will finally be ours."

The h-wagon reached the spot less than thirty seconds later. Powerful search-beams played over the place, and Tek-Judges aboard the vehicle scrutinised monitor screens that displayed the entire area on spectrums far beyond the power of the naked eye, but there was nothing to find.

The Dark Judges were gone.

Icarus sat in the darkness of his laboratory, quietly satisfied with the way events were proceeding. The Dark Judges had been freed, and so soon his own elevation to a higher state beyond life or death would begin. Of course, the Church of Death which he had secretly set up and then funded had been virtually wiped out by the night's events, but that didn't really matter, not in the grand scheme of things. Those fanatics had died happy in the knowledge that they had helped set free their precious masters and, more importantly, their role in Icarus's plans was over now anyway. After that, he really didn't care what happened to them. The only thing that mattered was what was going to happen to him tonight.

Rebirth.

Transcendence to a new and greater level of existence. That was why he had freed the Dark Judges, so that they could elevate him to the same status of everlasting life that they had achieved. The Dark Judges existed at a state beyond life and death, and so soon would Icarus.

"You cannot kill that which does not live," he murmured to himself, picking up the large syringe of fluid that lay on the desk before him. It contained the Regen retrovirus in its final, perfected state, and was far removed from the debased stuff which he had tested on the Death cult members to create his vampire creatures, or the even further adulterated muck which he had marketed as the EverPet product in order to fund his work.